Apropos of this posting, I now ask a different but related question: what ten films have stayed with you? Not the ten “best” films or the ten “greatest” films—this is a purely personal inquiry, and so should be answered as quickly as possible in order to avoid, insofar as possible, any self-conscious oh-what-a-cineaste-am-I posturing.
Go:
• Roman Polanski’s Chinatown
• Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game
• Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past
• Arthur Hiller’s The In-Laws
• Richard Benjamin’s My Favorite Year
• John Ford’s The Searchers
• Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me
• Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day
• Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane
• Steve Kloves’ The Fabulous Baker Boys
For the record, that list includes three comedies, three studio-system films, one Western, one film noir, one neo-noir film, the greatest movie ever made, and–somewhat to my retrospective surprise–nothing by Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock. So be it.